Sunday – Watching TV and texting

Today we finished putting the Christmas lights up. As you can see our house is now decorated with quite a few twinkly lights. Getting up the ladder and hanging those ones off the guttering wasn’t too great, especially when my fingers started turning a strange shade of blue but hey, it looks great now. :)

When I’d finished we watched a bit of TV before dinner. Emily was channel-hopping and flicking around from one music channel to another. We landed on one called “Fizz”, which is somewhere on Sky Digital. Anyway, they were playing the usual musical fluff and had one of those “live text message” screens running along the bottom. For a quid (what a rip-off) you can text in and see your message on screen – albeit without any sensitive information or swearing. I took a shot of this because I couldn’t make out what half the text messages said…

These particular messages weren’t too bad, but I’d missed the previous batch which seemed to make absolutely no sense – even in “text speak” which is bizarre to say the least. It appears that none of the kids watching and texting in knew what the English launguage was or how to use the T9 functionality on their mobile phones…..

“WHTS UP PPL. ME SXC GRL WITH SXC BLU I’S. NE HT BYZ RND? WNNA D8 ? TXT ME BCK!”

What now? Who ? Why the hell are you typing like that when you’ve got 160 characters to play with ? Come on, you should make the most of that 1 !!! In fact, after a bit I got ticked off by this crazy non-sensical rubbish and spent a quid of my own money to get a message on-screen. Obviously I had to dress it up a bit so I’d be “down wid da crew”, so as number “379” I typed…

That’ll tell them. In fact it did, messages then appeared saying…

“WOT U MEAN TIPE MSGS PROPER? DONT BOTHER 2 REPLY AS I AV NO CREDIT LFT”

Strangely most of the messages, apart from those asking for a “hot babe” or a “hot guy” were in fact about the level of credit left on their Pay-As-You-Go phones, which kept running out. I’m sure it had nothing to do with 1-per-text messages and 1.50-per-MMS messages to get their photos on TV.